Nobody Pays Attention in Class at Harvard. It’s Time to Change That.

America is facing an epidemic of inattention, and Harvard is no exception.

Walk into most any lecture hall at America’s greatest university and you’ll see a sea of laptop screens. Many will display diligent notes, yes. But at least as many and probably more will light up with Wordle, Slack, iMessage, Instagram, or Amazon.

Harvard’s inattention problem is nothing less than a crisis. Thankfully the University need look no further for a solution than its own backyard: This year, Cambridge Public Schools banned cellphone use during class time in middle and high schools, and Harvard should take a page out of their book.

Classroom inattention deserves our immediate attention for a few reasons.

First, it represents a serious threat to the quality of a Harvard education. Much ink has been spilled about grade inflation — the rigor of how students are assessed on the information they learn. But whether students truly learn the information appears to us a concern at least as serious. That a significant proportion of Harvard students get good grades while only hardly listening in class suggests something very worrisome about the College’s standard of education.

We speak from experience here. We’ve all indulged the urge to zone out after 10 or 15 minutes listening to a dense lecture and pulled up our website of choice, and that’s no moral failing.

Actually, it’s a lot more like an addiction. We’re talking about devices tailor-made to create dependency with all the harms that attend it. Just look at the pandemic: A year and a half of online schooling accustomed us to treating the classroom as just another tab and — surprise! — it made us less attentive and more hyperactive.

Like cigarettes, the users aren’t the only ones who bear the consequences — plenty of studies have shown that classroom device use also has a secondhand effect on non-users. Again, we know this from experience. With 15 laptop screens lighting up between you and your professor, it’s almost impossible for your attention not to drift to their contents. And as much as we do our peers a disservice when we use our phones or computers, we disrespect the world-class professors, lecturers, and other academic workers who dedicate their time and energy to teach our courses.

Now, to be clear, this isn’t a cry for device cubbies in the Science Center. The educators at CPS might have the right idea, but limiting device use in the classroom should look different for adults in college than for adolescents in secondary school.

A top-down devices ban would be a bridge too far, but to attend to our attention crisis, we all have a role to play.

Students, try your best to put away your phone and close that extra tab. We’ve all done it before. We’ll probably all do it again. By now, it feels like our brains are hardwired this way, so start small: Keep your phone in your backpack or take notes on paper.

Professors, ask yourselves whether laptops are truly necessary in your class. If not, consider a ban (with exceptions, of course, for those of us who use technology to meet accessibility needs). Your Q score might suffer, but we’ll all appreciate it in the long run.

And administrators, think big. It’s hard to change culture from on high and we’re not looking for edicts from above. But reflect on how to be a guiding hand pointing in the right direction.

Last semester, we — the Editorial Board — moved to ban laptops from our thrice-weekly staff meetings. We didn’t all love the idea. We weren’t sure what would happen. We couldn’t know how many of us would stick around for the experiment. But we tried it.

Now, we’re happy to report: It worked. Our membership stayed steady. Our meetings got better, snappier, smarter. It turns out it’s worth it to pay attention when someone has something to say.

We only get four years at Harvard. Let’s be present for them.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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